This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
I imagine this is getting up-voted here in response to the sentiment, and I'm not going to vote it down. But this approach is more often used by deists against rationalists, and the next step is book-burning.
This quote, for me, shows two ideas: The I defy the data that khafra mentions below, as well as, on Letterman's side, an ability to accurately detect bs and dismiss it without having spent significant resources on formal debate. That ability seems incredibly useful to me, and definitely worth cultivating.
I associate the second idea with the Prior Information Chapter of HPMoR